patrick.net

https://okaythennews.substack.com/p/to-beard-or-not-to-beard-there-is

With important and life-influencing policies hopefully deciding the outcome of the upcoming US election (little things like cost of living and national security), mainstream news outlet Politico draws our attention to no doubt the most important aspect of the election: facial hair. After the vice presidential debate Politico reports: “One of the first bits of nonverbal communication to appear in the debate was on JD Vance’s face: his beard. As POLITICO Magazine has noted before, Vance is the first White House wannabe to wear facial hair in 80 years. Our appearance is fundamental to our body language, and research indicates that voters see beards as (surprise, surprise) more masculine. That can be positive to some, reading as strength and competence. But to others, especially women, it can be negative, conveying aggression and opposition to feminist ideals.”

https://x.com/JDVance/status/1841566133343703177

"If you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to afford a good life. That's what Donald Trump and I are going to fight for."

The other side has voters who expect the good life without working hard or playing by the rules. One man's tax cut is a threat to another person's welfare check.

Half way through. This is one of the best interviews ever for a politician. Bad Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8mmTDDqAs

I'm JD, about the same age. He's my personality if you met me. I also don't get how Theo is pulling off these interviews. I love the swearing and not being fake. I'm close to putting the sign in the yard and pissing off friends. If Trump dies I want this guy in the white house. Not that I'd vote for Kamala anyway.

Booger says

Will Vance be able to do that? The list was sealed by a judge.

“This is a very unique country, and it was founded by some immigrants and some settlers. But just because we were founded by immigrants, doesn’t mean that 240 years later that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.”

“I think that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants. Are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”

- Vice President JD Vance, January 25, 2025

- - - - - - - -

A little political background regarding J D Vance, who had never run for, or, held political office before his U. S. Senate race:

Vance was a virtual unknown that decided to run for the U. S. Senate in Ohio, where, in the GOP primary, he was running a distant 3rd. in a three candidate race. Basically what happened is that the top two concentrated their attack ads on each other, effectively splitting the vote in the primary election, which greatly benefitted Vance, who ended up winning the primary. Vance then faced Democrat Congressman, and DC insider, Tim Ryan, the overwhelming favorite to win in the General. Prior to the election, Ryan met Vance in a debate, in which all of the political pundits confidently proclaimed that the political veteran Ryan would easily win. To the shock of many political pundits, the opposite occurred. Vance performed very impressively and Ryan was left looking confused and bewildered. Of course, Vance went on to not only defeat a long term, well known establishment candidate, but did so by a large margin.

Add to all of that, the fact that, like Trump, he is really an outsider and it looks to me like he has the potential to make a great President after Trump leaves office.

gabbar says

“I think that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants. Are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”

I found some interesting Obama-era programs that totalled $300M to some chick in DC, and to a buncha NGOs, most LIRS



I'm starting to wonder if "Faith Based Initiatives" was a cover for laundering subsidies to mass migrants via NGOs.

AmericanKulak says

I'm starting to wonder if "Faith Based Initiatives" was a cover for laundering subsidies to mass migrants via NGOs.

It probably is...these NGO's provide salaries to Democratic party workers and help their clients, the migrants, who in turn will vote Democrat or help Democratic strategies...Its a circle of money and political power.

Impressive stuff. Try to imagine Kamala Harris being pressed like this.

Vice President JD Vance's first interview | Face the Nation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPso1-N9O9s

As an Ohioian, I am happy for JD Vance. He has been fighter since he was born.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5pGTG_Kjc
The role of Mamaw in Hillbilly Elegy is played by Glenn Close...she is impressive, so was Mamaw.

I DONT CARE MARGARET!

HeadSet says

Will Vance be able to do that? The list was sealed by a judge.

This topic always gets me. The list doesn't matter. What can you prove? I've flown on a private plane, who knows the guy could have been a kid fucker flying it? What would that have to do with me? Furthermore maybe I went to a different location from the airport and never stepped foot in the fucking grounds/island?

Nothing will ever come of it. Only thing would be video footage on the island, which likely got wiped as they took the hard drives out through magnetic doors. I swear people keep thinking they landed planes on the island. They didn't. It was at STT. Boat over with no records of it.

This isn't your average marina if you haven't been. https://www.igymarinas.com/marinas/marina-yacht-haven-grande/ Looks small, but it's heavily fortified with massive boats. Not talking 80' boats. 300' boats. They're not charters either. Same boats have been there every time I go. I don't think the nasty was happening on the island, let's put it that way. The press doesn't go there and is too stupid. It was happening on boats. They'd just party on the island and toss the kid, chick or whoever overboard with weights. Epstein was a jew, that temple was probably for him personally. Otherwise the island is mostly normal looking besides the palm trees.

AmericanKulak says

I DONT CARE MARGARET!

But Margaret 'cared.' Did you happen to notice all of the frustrated face contortions in the Meet the Press interview. Talk about body language.

Margaret, you ignorant slut.

WookieMan says

It was happening on boats.

Boats likely anchored in no country's jurisdictional waters?

gabbar says

WookieMan says

It was happening on boats.

Boats likely anchored in no country's jurisdictional waters?

Were you on the boat? So you flew in on his jet? Doesn't mean you went to the island? You have to see it in person. A list is just flight records unless you were there to witness the crime.

The international waters don't matter if you dump the chick/boy whatever they were doing overboard with weights. I've been to St. Thomas at least a dozen times. Never have seen any military and island police don't police the water except the ports. It's a free for all. That marina I linked, good luck getting in from land or sea.

They have no witnesses and the main one "suicided" himself. Any list released results in absolutely nothing. This Epstein list is a waste of time.

JD vs Kamala on AI:

JD: The US possesses all components across the full AI stack, including advanced semiconductor design, frontier algorithms and transformational applications.

KH: AI is kind of a fancy thing. First of all it's two letters. It means 'Artificial Intelligence.'

stereotomy says

Hopefully, he'll kindle the fire in Trump's belly instead of backstabbing him like that traitor Pence.

Vance's benefactor over the years is Peter Thiel (Palantir Technologies).

A Trump Party Hosted by Peter Thiel, with All of Silicon Valley
(Peter Thiel, and the nutbags in charge of Stargate AI)

https://dnyuz.com/2025/01/18/a-trump-party-hosted-by-peter-thiel-with-all-of-silicon-valley/
(copy of paywalled NYT article, Jan. 18, 2025)

Palantir is soon to be a TRILLION-dollar global company. Palantir Technologies serve international (UK, Germany, Israel etc.), federal, state and local governments.

Peter Thiel is a United States Chess Federation National Master. He started playing the game at six. Child prodigy. In 1992, his peak FIDE rating was 2342. His current FIDE rating is 2199 (one point below USCF Candidate Master).

Vance #48, before 2028? Checkmate.

Currently reading Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" and it's pretty good. I had not realized the kind of poverty and dysfunction he came from. He has a good attitude though.

I guess this informs his attitude for youthful mistakes. As it very well should. Youth is about fucking up and finding out. If you survive, you have acquired the best form of FAFO wisdom - "Visceral Wisdom" - where you thank God you weren't killed, and you learned the limits of being an asshole or dumb and stupid.

Oh shit, turns out Vance was clearly infected with wokeness during his time at Yale Law. On page 190, instead of using the correct word "wife" he uses the leftist sex-neutral term "life partner". He goes on to rail against the hillbillies he comes from:

- complains that conservatives think Obama is a Muslim (which he technically is by Islamic law, as his father was Muslim)
- complains that conservatives think or suspect Obama was foreign born (seems possible to me)
- praises Obama as excelling in the Ivy League, being "brilliant, wealthy" and having great diction
- complains that only 6% of Americans think the media is "very trustworthy" (which it clearly is not)
- complains that conservatives think that the US was involved in 9/11 (seems possible to me given Bush's close ties to the Saudis)
- complains that whites think that universities are rigged against whites (obviously true, lawsuits about that are pending, maybe done by now)
- complained that his dad asked if he had to "pretend to be black or liberal" to get into Yale (when that is provably helpful, especially the black thing)
- was proud that Hillary had gone to Yale Law
- worried about "racism"

OK, the book was published in 2016, but I'm still worried that Yale got to Vance and successfully indoctrinated him with the usual far-left elitist crap beliefs.

Patrick says

OK, the book was published in 2016, but I'm still worried that Yale got to Vance and successfully indoctrinated him with the usual far-left elitist crap beliefs.

People change though. I used to smoke cigs. I was scared of black people, but now I know many more and don't care. I loved road trips and now I hate them. I'll never get another animal again even though I love dogs (as pets). I voted for Obama and didn't the 2nd time.

I think it's okay to change positions in life. You just can't be dishonest about it. "I thought that then and now think this way and here's why." Not a massive JD fan, but he is younger. A lot changes from college to working years once you're out of the BS university system. Having kids was the biggest life changer for me.

Having money now is also another biggie. You realize how much government takes and gives to others that do nothing. That's how I got blinded by Obama. Bunch of BS campaign talk to get elected.

Patrick says

OK, the book was published in 2016, but I'm still worried that Yale got to Vance and successfully indoctrinated him with the usual far-left elitist crap beliefs.

Vance joined a fairly based Catholic Men's Group after that point.

Patrick says

Currently reading Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" and it's pretty good. I had not realized the kind of poverty and dysfunction he came from. He has a good attitude though.

Watch the movie too, Patrick. Its a good one.

Thanks @gabbar

I watched it last night with my wife. It was very good, and true to the book.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/freedoms-ring-saturday-february-15

Yesterday, Politico ran a shocking story headlined, “Vance brings a wrecking ball to diplomatic gathering in Munich.” It described Vice-President Wrecking Ball’s speech yesterday at the annual Munich Security Conference, which is like Davos for European security policy. My first thought was, the headline should have been, “United States Has a Vice President Who Can Give a Coherent Speech.” I mean, Vance didn’t even mention the passage of time once. ...

https://thespectator.com/topic/read-jd-vance-full-speech-decay-europe/

... Vance flipped the script and served them something they’d never tasted: bitter truth.

Vance informed the shocked EU delegates, “the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about most is the threat from within.”

You could practically hear the shocked and deeply offended gasps when he explicitly named Europe’s elites as the real security risk—not Putin, not Xi, but the unelected bureaucrats, the censors, the election tamperers, and the speech police inside their own governments.

Vance came with receipts: he cited example after example of European attacks on free speech and free elections. He mentioned people arrested for silent prayer outside abortion clinics, those jailed for complaining about uncontrolled migration, free elections overturned on thin evidence of “Russian interference,” and of course, all the recent anguish over Elon Musk’s support for a particular populist political party in Germany.

Europe’s leaders love to label their critics as threats to democracy—but democracy’s biggest threat is Europe’s leaders.

https://thespectator.com/topic/read-jd-vance-full-speech-decay-europe/

Read: J.D. Vance’s full speech on the decline of Europe

‘We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership’

I just want to say that we’re very moved, and our thoughts and prayers are with Munich and everybody affected by the evil inflicted on this beautiful community. ...

We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. ... the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. ...

I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content,” or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of “combating misogyny” on the internet.

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant — and I’m quoting — a “free pass” to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a fifty-one-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing fifty meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son.

He and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new Buffer Zones Law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.

Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no. This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime in Britain and across Europe. ...

I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaped from leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth. ...

Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them. ...

I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. ...

Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all-time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all-time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since.

And we know the situation. It didn’t materialize in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?

It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-twenties, already known to police, rammed a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. ...

Contrary to what you might hear, a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. ...

https://babylonbee.com/news/europeans-beg-jd-vance-to-become-president-of-europe

https://babylonbee.com/news/vance-speech-denouncing-eu-censorship-censored-by-eu

https://x.com/EvaVlaar/status/1890475677259837814

Who were the two who downvoted this thread?

OkDOGEisAmountingToSomething says

Who were the two who downvoted this thread?

Wasn't me. His face does piss me off though. Not sure why.

This benchmark speech will be read by future generations, JD became a part of history at Munich.

WookieMan says

OkDOGEisAmountingToSomething says

Who were the two who downvoted this thread?

Wasn't me. His face does piss me off though. Not sure why.

It's the fucking eye liner, LOL.

RWSGFY says

It's the fucking eye liner, LOL.

You think it's actual eyeliner? Not saying you're wrong as it looks like it is. Might just be the shape of his eyes and dark hair.

I don't know, now that I look at images again, his whole head bothers me. Not saying he can't be a good VP, but it's hard to look at him. Although I suppose as a straight male Trump is pretty ugly as well, he just entertains so it's not as noticeable.

Patrick says

https://babylonbee.com/news/europeans-beg-jd-vance-to-become-president-of-europe

When Trump is done here, can't he in theory move to Germany, claim citizenship there, then run for office?